Am I the only one who thinks the parent is to blame for this because she didn't have the common sense to give gloves to her kid in the cold weather... To me that's unacceptable.
No, you're not the only one.
The Hand Licking Incident
171–180 of 358 posts
Re: The Hand Licking Incident
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But appropriately, rarely applied, I can say with certainty it worked for me. No, you can't. Maybe it did, but you don't know how you'd acted if they'd just talked to you instead. It's easy to think we can untangle how a given event shaped us, but we really are horribly bad at it. It ignores that people who never were spanked regularly can tell similar stories about just having been talked to (that's how I learned…
My 2 year old announces that the oven is hot, then goes up to touch it to confirm, regardless of me explaining it to him. I've never spanked him, I wouldn't be confident of him understanding a danger I had explained to him though.
At 2 years old there's only one thing a parent can do to avoid a child touching a hot oven: make it physically impossible for the child to access a hot oven.
Re: The Hand Licking Incident
#173I love this story. Little kid logic is so foreign to me now it makes me a little sad. Another example - we have our nephew stay over sometimes. One night, he did not, absolutely NOT want to go into the room he sleeps in. We couldn't work it out. He slept there a bunch of other times, no problem. Tried picking him up to carry him in, but no, he screamed like crazy. After a long, long time, he settled enough to tell us…
>Little kid logic My favourite is when you ask a crying child where they hurt them selves, and they point to the table they just walked into. Edit: Or have a paddy because they can't join the banana they've just cut in half, back together again.
This last one comes back to bites as adults too... with relationships and lots of other things entropy finally took.
Re: The Hand Licking Incident
#174I love this story. Little kid logic is so foreign to me now it makes me a little sad. Another example - we have our nephew stay over sometimes. One night, he did not, absolutely NOT want to go into the room he sleeps in. We couldn't work it out. He slept there a bunch of other times, no problem. Tried picking him up to carry him in, but no, he screamed like crazy. After a long, long time, he settled enough to tell us…
I remember, during a thunderstorm, being utterly convinced that a war was being fought outside. I was terrified ...
I saw incoming ICBMs. (Airplanes on approach.)
Re: The Hand Licking Incident
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh... I can count on a shop teacher's hand the number of times I was actually spanked or swatted when I was a kid, but after talking to my Mom about it, I think she made the right choice the times she did. To give a specific example, once was when I was about five, I had just learned about electromagnets, and was actively trying to shove bare wire into an outlet. Yes, the spanking did make me a little afraid of pokin…
There are plug covers you can buy for Hell, my parents also told me when I was ~4 not to stick anything in the electrical outlets. No spankings were involved. I listened because why wouldn't I? (Well, at least until senior year in college, when I was like "What happens if I strip an Ethernet cord and stick it in an electrical outlet?" I'd missed the exploding-wires demonstration in my physics course, y'see. Did not g…
These are not recommended in the UK; UK sockets have internal safety features which plastic plug covers are actually more likely to compromise (by a child e.g. inserting one upside down. The plug cover will usually be thing enough to bend and make this possible, and then the shutter will be up and the contacts exposed.)
Re: The Hand Licking Incident
#176It's so easy for parents (and teachers) to misdiagnose strange child behaviors. TFA is a wonderful example. Parents need to watch for things like blood sugar problems, autism (e.g., failure to make eye contact), skin problems, mild food allergies (why does the kid not like _fill in the blank_, maybe it's because it tastes "spicy" to them), and much else. Young children will not figure these things out by themselves.…
> "It might be interesting to collate a compendium of strange child behaviors with simple explanations, and other problems to watch out for." I couldn't disagree more. This seems like a step in the wrong direction. The last thing we need to do is label even more human behaviors than we already do into the bucket of "strange." Actually, even saying that parents need to "debug" these problems may be going too far. Huma…
> The last thing we need to do is label even more human behaviors than we already do into the bucket of "strange."
I couldn't disagree more. Having had a proper manual for my human body would have been amazing.
I had a less intense but somewhat similar issue to OP's child. I was licking my lips and therefor got bullied for using "lipstick". Both stopped only after on one of those occasions a kid in their mentioned licking can cause it, while i pretended to ignore them. I'm quite thankful to him and wish i could help others just like that.
Another is being lactose-intolerant. No idea when I became that, must have happened quite late. But it took me embarrassingly long (mid twenties) to figure out, change my diet and thus get rid of those messy bowel movements.
I see little value in not having those kind of knowledge available and instead having to find out yourself. And parenting would hardly be possible without understanding your child's behavior. If you have a problem with calling it "strange" or "debug", I'm fine with calling it something else. But i doub't many here care about (those) labels.
Re: The Hand Licking Incident
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But appropriately, rarely applied, I can say with certainty it worked for me. No, you can't. Maybe it did, but you don't know how you'd acted if they'd just talked to you instead. It's easy to think we can untangle how a given event shaped us, but we really are horribly bad at it. It ignores that people who never were spanked regularly can tell similar stories about just having been talked to (that's how I learned…
Young children have a very limited ability to understand cause and effect. It simply isn't possible to explain to a toddler that "if you run out in the road then you might get badly hurt", because their brains still have a limited grasp of "if... then" and "badly hurt". I am strongly opposed to corporal punishment in the general case, but I am willing to concede the possibility that it is a necessary option in cases…
Ok so if they don't understand cause and effect why would they be able to relate the spanking with their "wrong" action?
Re: The Hand Licking Incident
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But appropriately, rarely applied, I can say with certainty it worked for me. No, you can't. Maybe it did, but you don't know how you'd acted if they'd just talked to you instead. It's easy to think we can untangle how a given event shaped us, but we really are horribly bad at it. It ignores that people who never were spanked regularly can tell similar stories about just having been talked to (that's how I learned…
Young children have a very limited ability to understand cause and effect. It simply isn't possible to explain to a toddler that "if you run out in the road then you might get badly hurt", because their brains still have a limited grasp of "if... then" and "badly hurt". I am strongly opposed to corporal punishment in the general case, but I am willing to concede the possibility that it is a necessary option in cases…
How can corporal punishment be a necessity in a life or death situation? I think you mean in preventing the recurrence of that situation. Screams and tears of fear and other emotions will suffice. One day my 3 yr old decided to bike away in a park near a pond. I cried when helpful bystanders found him about 1km away. (Don't search in concentric circles! Go for the playground.) We all share that memory even though a lot of other memories of preschoolers fade. No corporal punishment necessary.
Re: The Hand Licking Incident
#179So the teacher, grandparent, and father never bothered asking why he's licking his hands, and his mother only after a lot of drama, including spanking(!!)
I get that being a parent is hard and try to hold off my judgements on stuff like this over the internet, but ... I am not wildly impressed by this teacher or their parenting.
I'm glad that at least the mother came to her senses later on and decided to treat her child like a human being.
Re: The Hand Licking Incident
#180So the teacher, grandparent, and father never bothered asking why he's licking his hands, and his mother only after a lot of drama, including spanking(!!) I get that being a parent is hard and try to hold off my judgements on stuff like this over the internet, but ... I am not wildly impressed by this teacher or their parenting. I'm glad that at least the mother came to her senses later on and decided to treat her ch…
> So the teacher, grandparent, and father never bothered asking why he's licking his hands, and his mother only after a lot of drama, including spanking(!!)
No, the mother did ask:
"I tried grilling him about why he was doing this so I could find some solution."
The article doesn't imply that she asked him only after spanking him, and it seems unlikely that she did.
Edit: fixed the quote from the article.